1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to pattern recognition and particularly to recognition of complex handwritten characters including Chinese characters (Kanji), Hiragana characters and Katakana characters.
The recognition of complex characters has been pursued with limited success for many years. Various recognition schemes have been reported for hand registered characters. Schemes are typically based on spatial and certain limited shape characteristics of the strokes. One of the problems has been the differentiation between characters of different character sets. For example, in the Kanji system there are approximately 10,000 distinguishable characters in use, representing various syllables, words, phrases and concepts. Other character systems are known which are phonetic in nature. Examples are the Hiragana and the Katakana, which have considerably smaller character sets. Heretofore no one has reported an economical and effective automatic character recognition scheme whereby the character sets can be distinguished from one another.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Various methods for character recognition have been reported in the literature. Known systems have attempted to categorize characters on the basis of a general data base containing all possible characters. Due to the large potential data base, such schemes are typically expensive, cumbersome and slow. Commercially viable systems are heretofore unknown.